Part of my unease with that “formalists versus zinesters” “debate” was how unnecessary it seemed (beyond providing some personal edification to the instigators); it was as if a faculty member from Juilliard had expressed a desire for “a dialogue” with Sid Vicious about chord progressions. It’s not that these two don’t see eye to eye on matters of music theory, which is what the professor thinks, it’s that the punks have arrived on the scene with such a completely different set of values that they might as well be from different planets.

There is also little fruit to be found in having a “dialogue,” I think, because it doesn’t seem particularly hard to see where the “zinesters” (if I must use that word) are coming from, and the idea that they need to explain themselves is confounding. This group consciously and deliberately rejects indie’s failed split from the mainstream and its poorly-concealed capitalist underpinnings, and instead upholds personal expression as the highest ideal, the only goal that matters. And in order to do that successfully, they must break off completely, not at a branch somewhere on the tree but at the very root of the established order. This cannot be papered over or explained away; no amount of hemming and hawing over the definition of the word “game” will fix the fact that there are games out there now that willfully abnegate other games.

Porpentine, in reposting the original draft of her “7 Thoughts on Women” on her own site, also addresses the trap of the “dialogue”:

One of the greatest challenges of this time is not blatant misogyny (an easy target for outrage anyone can participate in) but the crypto-misogynist, whose fear is concealed behind language that sounds basically okay to everyone but the women it is intended to harm.

They’ve figured out they can’t call us bitches, so they resurface under a thin veneer of patronizing “civility”, neutralizing our energies with mindless, boring semantics.

They will find endless ways to intellectualize their discomfort.

[…] Even doing basic work in the games industry, whether it be in a mainstream or indie capacity, becomes filled with chronic ambient terror

[M]ight we find ourselves able to construct more powerful narratives if we let the designer and the player take care of the creative heavy lifting? Let the designer imply connections, let the player form and breathe life to those connections, and let the computer just do its thing to provide the tools and mechanics to facilitate this?

Following on Darius Kazemi’s Fuck Videogames from last week, Janet H. Murray offers a considerate response: “Videogame design is not exciting because it is ‘new.’ Nothing gets old faster than mere novelty. Videogame art is exciting because it is a productive way of exploring the truly, historically new affordances of the digital medium.”